The current state of the art with respect to teaching of music involves a teacher teaching a student the seven different letter names of the musical notes. Teaching such notes in isolation as has been done since the days of Mozart results in a lack of structure which causes confusion and frustration for the student because of the difficulty of identifying the various keys, among other things. Students often find themselves wondering why they are being taught these mismatched techniques. In addition, several questions are raised by such a teaching method. How is the student going to apply themselves to achieve the ability to recognize the keys? Are they to spend hours at the piano practicing naming keys? How does one attack this methodically? This lack of structure sends the student home with a vague assignment resulting in further frustration.
Furthermore, when the student returns the following week, how will the teacher evaluate the student's command of the previous lesson? An established method for evaluating a student's direct ability to recognize the white keys does not currently exist. There are such devices as keyboard picture challenges in which the student will have written the letter-names on the picture, but this does not require immediate recall. Therefore, this ability is often assumed and/or overlooked by the teacher because, from the teacher's point of view, the white key names are obvious. A qualified piano teacher will be aware of this and thus determine their own method of testing the student's recall by simply requesting them to find a specific key and play it in reaction to its letter name. However, even a highly skilled teacher could potentially be unaware of the mental processes the student is performing in order to arrive at the desired answer. Typically the student will have understand that the white keys are in alphabetical order. Therefore, the typical process a student would perform is to “count up from the one that you know.” While this process does achieve the desired result of identifying the appropriate key, it does so in a manner which does not allow a student to efficiently identify a particular key and it certainly does not do them much good when they are trying to play a song. Moreover, a teacher cannot determine whether or not the student is performing these processes in order to arrive at a correct key identification.
Moreover, the first piano lesson traditionally involves the staff, which is the set of five horizontal lines and four spaces between them, each of which represent a different musical pitch. The traditional method for memorizing the lines of a staff is difficult and non-intuitive, and is always a point of confusion for piano and music students in general. Traditionally, students have dealt with this issue by way of a mnemonic. There is not likely not an English speaking human who hasn't heard the phrase “Every Good Boy Does Fine.” This phrase attempts to define the treble clef staff lines because each line starts with the first letter of each word. However, when presented to a beginning student, that is often not explained. In addition, in order to translate the sentence to labels of the staff, a student must discard the portion of the words after the first letter. Lastly, where the mnemonic really breaks down, is when music is descending, which it does roughly half of the time. Further still, because of tradition, these mnemonic phrases are very frequently presented to a student at a very early stage of musical education. At the same time, they are very rarely applied until much later in one's musical education. This is the way that music has been taught to new students for centuries.
In summary, the present state of the art consists of an inconsistent and mismatched set of tools which can often leave a student frustrated, confused, and uninterested in learning music. The disclosed methods consider these techniques to be unnecessary and outdated and seek to replace them.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualifies as prior art merely by virtue of inclusion in this section.